Monday, December 14, 2015

Doenças, Aniversários, e Alegria

We received this email on December 7, 2015. No pictures this week. It looks like Elder Olivier had a hospital experience, though.....

Hi everyone!!!!!!!!

So this week was super interesting. First, the week started off with a regular day. Like usual I ate a lot and drank a lot of water and juice. Then, suddenly, I felt super horrible, and......let´s just say that all of the food and water and juice didn´t want to be inside my body anymore. So the next day I spent some time being sick and staying in our house all day. By the end of the day I felt worse, so we went to the hospital. I got the whole brazilian emergency room experience. You pretty much just wait there for a really long time while they do all sorts of tests on you, including, you guessed it, an ultrasound (no, I am not pregnant). I guess they do that for worms. So, thankfully, it turned out that I didn´t have worms, I just had food poisoning. At least that was what I gathered from the emergency room guy´s broken english (all of the doctors wanted to test their english on me). So he gave me a prescription and I was good to go.

Then, the next day, my companion started having the same problems as me. So we spent some more time inside all day. Fun. But now, we are both better. The biggest problem with all of this is that we had to reschedule everyone with all of the people we are teaching, which is kind of disappointing. But there´s always next week!

So I think the highlight of this week was that two of the families here baked me birthday cake on friday. Haha. That was super nice of them. But, other than that, not much happened this week.

So I have been thinking a lot this week about how people gain a testimony of the gospel and how it is necessary that people need to find out for themselves that the Book of Mormon and the Church are true. As missionaries, our job is to unvite people to learn these things for themselves. It is interesting how faith works. We as missionaries can´t give people faith. We can only invite people to have faith for themselves. I really like Alma 32:21:

"And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to havea perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith yehope for things which are not seen, which are true."

When we act on faith, we don´t necessarily have a perfect knowledge. But, we act with the knowledge that we have and rely on the fact that God knows more than we do. I know that faith is something really important, especially in gaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon and the Church.